Putting the 'Fun' in Funeral
by vanillafluffy
Summary: A closed casket can hide a lot of things, one of them being the absence of a corpse. What if the Comedian didn't stay dead? AU, crossover.


In this version, Laurie either doesn't exist, or she was fathered by the Silk Specter's husband of record. The Comedian never fathered any offspring. Period.

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Putting the 'Fun' in Funeral

A closed casket can hide a lot of things, one of them being the absence of a corpse. The coffin used at Edward Blake's funeral went into the ground weighted down with the unclaimed body of a derelict-and six cinderblocks because the bum was severely malnourished. There was no autopsy since the cause of death was self-evident. .

Only one person other than the surviving Blake knew the truth, an attendant at the mortuary that had scooped his remains up from the sidewalk-he had been gently cleaning the blood from Eddie's left leg when he groaned.

"Lie still," the caregiver advised. "The pain will pass."

"What the hell?" Contrary to the recommendation, Blake tried to sit up, but his body wouldn't cooperate. As with most head trauma, there was a fuzzy patch of memory. He knew the feeling from other head injuries...his last clear recollection was flipping channels and hearing some talking heads yackitty-yakking about the Doomsday clock. "What's going on? Where am I?"

"You were thrown out the window of your apartment, Mr. Blake."

"You're joking," the Comedian said, looking at the man who was rinsing a bloody sponge in a basin of water. "That's thirty stories up. I'd be a fucking pancake if that happened." A memory was trying to surface-he remembered who might be trying to kill him, but not why.

"Very nearly. It was quite a mess." The man seemed young to Eddie-early thirties, fair skin, hair the color of cinnamon-and unusually calm to be having a conversation with a corpse. Unless he was the victim of a really massive prank and this guy was in on it. What the hell, he could play the straight man just this once...

"I don't see any Pearly Gates."

"You won't, Mr. Blake, unless you're very unlucky and your head is completely severed from your body. You're an Immortal. You'll never get any older than you are now."

"Are you out of your blue-eyed mind?"

The attendant wiped his hands, left Eddie's line of sight for a moment, and returned with a Polaroid picture, which he held up for Eddie to look at. There was no way to fake something like that, at least not that he knew of, and the sight of his twisted, battered body, blood soaking his robe and pooling on the pavement was enough to render the Comedian momentarily speechless.

"You'll learn to recognize the presence of others of our kind," the young man said serenely. "It comes from here..." He rested a slim hand on Eddie's chest. "Like the twang of a bowstring when the arrow is released, or a gong being struck. You'll know!"

"You said 'our kind'?"

"I was shot six times," his benefactor disclosed without rancor, "because I got on the wrong side of some bootleggers. I've been 'dead' since 1926." He smirked. "So have they." 1926? The joker claimed to be...what, twenty years older than him? And still looked young and baby-faced? "By the way, I'm Brendan, Brendan Riordan."

His shoulder felt like it was full of ground glass, but Blake managed to extend a hand. Riordan accepted it and the other man squeezed it. He didn't have enough strength back to put much of a grip into it, but he already felt markedly better than when he'd awakened.

"We can arrange a funeral for you-closed casket, of course, given the presumed conditions of your remains." Brandon lowered his voice in sympathy. "How will your family be taking this?"

Blake snorted. With an effort, he raised himself to an upright position. "Not an issue," he said gruffly. "I'm not a family man." He wanted to say 'Mind your own business', but didn't have the energy. "Believe me, there's not going to be much of a turnout."

In fact, there were few mourners at the sham funeral. Eddie Blake wasn't there to see it. Enough of his memory had come back for him to remember why he'd been killed, and why being in New York City was a bad idea these days. He let Brendan know that this would be a really good time to take a long vacation in Miami Beach, went back to his apartment and stripped it of his cache of weapons.

Since there would be too many questions about his luggage if he flew, Blake took a train south to Tallahassee. From there, he went west. He was in Dallas, Texas when the capture of the masked vigilante Rorschach made the evening news, and had reached Mexico City when the nuclear pulses attributed to Dr. Manhattan occurred. From there, he had a long way to go-crossing the Panama Canal Zone and traversing the length of South America. Then there was the matter of getting to Antarctica-that took some ingenuity-and locating Karnak, Ozymandias' fortress of solitude.

When he got his hands on Ozymandias, inside the shattered ruins of his base, their battle was as vicious as the first one. The Comedian, who had experienced the stirring sensation described in the presence of another Immortal during his long journey, felt no such sensation here. Adrian Veidt, the smartest man in the world, was only mortal, and he ultimately died at the hands of the one person he thought he was safe from.

The joke was on him.


End file.
